Automation Rules — Making Your Board Work for You

Automation rules let your Tickets boards run more of themselves. Instead of a manager manually assigning every new ticket, setting due dates, or posting reminders, you describe the rule once — and Pulse handles it every time the condition is met.

Finding automations

Automation rules are per-board. Open the board you want to configure and click the Settings gear icon. The Automations tab lists all rules for that board and lets you create new ones.

How a rule is structured

Every automation rule has three parts:

• When — the trigger: what has to happen for the rule to run
• If — optional conditions: filters that narrow down which tickets this rule applies to
• Then — the actions: what Pulse does automatically

Triggers (When)

Choose one trigger per rule:

• Ticket is created on this board — fires the moment a new ticket arrives, whether created internally or sent in from another branch.
• Ticket enters a column — fires when a ticket moves into a specific column. You can target by column name or by column type (for example, "any Approval column" or "any Done column"). This covers both manual moves and moves triggered by other automation rules.
• Ticket is overdue — fires when a ticket's due date passes and it's still open. Checked daily by Pulse.
• Ticket is due soon — fires when a ticket is within 3 days of its due date and still open. Checked daily.
• Approval is granted — fires when an approver signs off on a ticket in an approval column.
• Approval is rejected — fires when an approver rejects a ticket and writes a rejection note.

Conditions (If)

Conditions are optional. Without them, the rule applies to every ticket that hits the trigger. Add conditions to be more selective:

• Category is — only run this rule for tickets in certain categories (e.g. "only Design tickets")
• Priority is — filter by priority level (e.g. "only High or Urgent tickets")
• Sent from another branch — run this rule only for cross-branch tickets, only for same-organisation tickets, or for both

All conditions are AND-applied: a ticket must pass every condition you set for the rule to fire.

Actions (Then)

A single rule can have multiple actions. They run in the order you arrange them:

• Assign team members — adds one or more people as assignees. Each person is notified.
• Set due date — sets the due date to a number of days from now (e.g. +3 days, +7 days).
• Set priority — changes the priority to Low, Normal, High, or Urgent.
• Notify someone — sends a custom message to one or more team members, in-app or by email. The message can include placeholders: {ticket.reference}, {ticket.title}, {ticket.priority}, {ticket.due_date}, {board.name}, {rule.name}.
• Move to column — moves the ticket to a different column on the same board. Approval gates are always respected — a rule trying to move a ticket past an approval column without sign-off is recorded as skipped, not forced through.
• Post a comment — adds a comment to the ticket's thread, authored as "Automation" rather than a team member. Comments can include the same placeholders as notifications.

Practical examples

Auto-assign design tickets on arrival: When = ticket is created; If = category is Design; Then = assign Sarah, set priority to High, set due date to +3 days.

Overdue reminder: When = ticket is overdue; If = none; Then = post comment "This ticket ({ticket.reference}) is now overdue — please update the status or add a note.", notify assignees.

Move to Done after approval: When = approval is granted; If = none; Then = move to Done column.

Escalate high-priority inbound cross-branch tickets: When = ticket is created; If = priority is Urgent, sent from another branch; Then = assign intake manager, set due +1 day, notify intake manager by email.

Welcome comment on new ticket: When = ticket is created; If = none; Then = post comment "Thanks for submitting {ticket.reference}. The team will review this within 2 business days."

Rule activity and history

Each rule in the Automations list shows how many times it has run and how many times it encountered a problem (for example, trying to assign a person who has since left the organisation). Click a rule to expand its Recent runs — a log of the last 10 firings with the ticket reference and outcome for each.

In the ticket activity feed

Every action taken by an automation rule is logged in the ticket's Activity tab. The entry shows "Automation" as the author rather than a team member's name, so it is always clear whether a human or a rule made the change.

Safety limits

Two guards prevent runaway automation:

• Approval gates are never bypassed. If a rule tries to move a ticket forward past an approval column without sign-off, the move is skipped and logged. The gate must be cleared by a human approver.
• Loop prevention. A rule that moves a ticket into a column can trigger another "ticket enters column" rule. Pulse allows this to chain up to three times before stopping automatically, preventing infinite loops.